Henry Denker, Author in Many Genres, Dies at 99

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: May 27, 2012

In a 1949 press release sent out after the publication of his first novel, ''I'll Be Right Home, Ma,'' about a light-heavyweight fighter with ''a sweet right-hand sock,'' Henry Denker declared his belief that ''a writer should be active in several forms of his trade.'' He added: ''Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can't possibly write a line you do it anyhow.''

His prolific career is evidence that he followed his own prescription.

Mr. Denker, who wrote Broadway plays about, among other things, Sigmund Freud and the Korean War; radio scripts based on the Bible; television movies about war crimes and vigilantism; and novels about -- in addition to boxers -- doctors, lawyers, movie people and various social issues, died on May 15 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

The cause was lung cancer, said Robert A. Livingston, a friend.

A lawyer who gave up practicing to take up a writing career, Mr. Denker is best known for his stage work. He wrote seven plays that reached Broadway, including ''Time Limit!'' (1956), written with Ralph Berkey and starring Arthur Kennedy and Richard Kiley, about an American officer accused of treasonous behavior while captive in a North Korean prison camp; and ''A Case of Libel'' (1963), adapted from the memoir ''My Life in Court'' by the trial lawyer Louis Nizer, focusing on the well-publicized case in which the war correspondent Quentin Reynolds sued the columnist Westbrook Pegler for libel and won a judgment of $175,001, a record at the time. (Van Heflin starred as the Nizer character, though all the characters' names were fictionalized.)

Mr. Denker adapted both plays for the screen: ''Time Limit!'' for the movies, starring Richard Widmark and Richard Basehart, and ''A Case of Libel'' for television. Indeed, Mr. Denker was deft at recycling. He refashioned his 1982 novel, ''Outrage!,'' about a man on trial for killing his daughter's killer, into a stage play and a television movie.

Another of Mr. Denker's notable plays, ''A Far Country'' (1961), was about Freud's breakthrough case, his treatment of a psychosomatically paralyzed young woman, Elizabeth von Ritter. Starring Steven Hill and Kim Stanley, it earned warm reviews -- ''Mr. Denker has captured the dramatic core of an unforgettable experience in human revelation,'' wrote Howard Taubman of The New York Times -- but also the disapprobation of Freud's nephew, Edward L. Bernays. In an article in Variety, Mr. Bernays accused Mr. Denker of inaccurately rendering his uncle's personality as driven and prone to displays of anger and of distorting relationships within the Freud family. Mr. Denker responded in Variety with a point-by-point defense of his work.

''No man is an unalloyed genius,'' he said about his subject in an interview with The New York Post. ''Freud was a genius, not a monolithic monotone. He was an up-and-down guy with great human drive. It would be a disservice to portray him the way some people think it would be 'nice' to portray him, rather than the way historians and biographers know he was.''

Mr. Denker was born on Madison Avenue at 97th Street in Manhattan on Nov. 25, 1912, and after his father's fur business went bankrupt, the family lived in reduced circumstances in Brooklyn and later the Bronx, where he attended Morris High School. He later graduated from New York University, where he also earned a law degree.

Until he was in his midteens he expected to become a rabbi, but he gave up that prospect, he said, because his family needed the money -- and anyway, he noted, his faith was shaky. After the age of 15, instead of studying Judaism at night, he worked in a shoe store.

''What appealed to me about the law was the drama of the courtroom,'' he recalled in an interview after ''A Far Country'' opened on Broadway, ''but when I knew that I'd have little opportunity for that, I looked elsewhere.'' He turned to writing, he said, after he did some legal work for theater companies.

He wrote largely for radio in the 1940s, achieving recognition for a show based on Bible stories, ''The Greatest Story Ever Told,'' which he wrote for nearly a decade. Along with Fulton Oursler's book of the same name, the show was used as source material for the 1965 film version of the life of Jesus Christ, also called ''The Greatest Story Ever Told,'' directed by George Stevens and starring Max von Sydow.

Mr. Denker wrote more than 30 novels, including ''The Director'' (1971), a risqu?epiction of Hollywood shenanigans; ''The Physicians'' (1975), in which honorable doctors are sued for malpractice; ''Judge Spencer Dissents'' (1986), a critique of the legal system that revolves around an eccentric judge; and ''Horowitz and Mrs. Washington'' (1979), about an elderly Jewish mugging victim and the black nurse who cares for him, which he immediately turned into a stage play with Sam Levene and Esther Rolle that appeared -- very briefly -- on Broadway in 1980.

For television, Mr. Denker wrote ''Material Witness,'' about an office worker who witnesses a murder, which appeared on the program ''Kraft Theater'' in 1958 and starred Milton Berle, who had stepped away from his comedy show, in a rare dramatic role; and ''Judgment: The Court Martial of Lt. William Calley'' (1975), about the central figure of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

Information about survivors was unavailable. Mr. Denker's wife of nearly 60 years, the former Edith Rose Heckman, died in 2005. He was a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital when they met.

''I did the clich?thing and fell in love with my nurse,'' he said.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.